No matter what you say or do, someone will find it offensive.
Which is why you "live and let live" regardless of what others say or do. I'm not responsible for your behavior, only mine and it's my responsibility to do the right thing, regardless of what you or society in general thinks. I can only change my little corner of the world, I can only really control my behavior and it's folly to worry about changing things beyond my control.
So if they don't like me, that's their issue, not mine. Some consider me an AssHat, many don't. It's up to them, it matters not to me.
It's a fine line. There is no issue in calling someone out on their bullshit, whether it's a bad work product or a bad attitude. It should be done, else the bad product and attitude will most certainly continue. It's just best done tactfully, which is the area where Linus was lacking.
I have no issues calling bad work bad or bad attitudes being unhelpful, but I do tread lightly in such conversations, especially when I'm dealing with peers. Having such conversations are a bit easier with subordinates, but even then, it pays to be very careful. But this kind of thing is about helping the person who is producing the bad work or having the bad attitude and not about just confronting to get my frustrations out.
Linus' issue was he was venting at the expense of his subordinates. He let his anger drive him, so instead of being tactful and effective, he drove folks off. I know I decided to not ever consider working on the Kernel project because of his antics. I'm not claiming they lost anything by not having my help, but I'm sure I am not alone and chances are somebody out there who would have been an asset, never considered it for the same reason.
If you come up with a proof and it's wrong, you're banned from Math.
If you say a proof is wrong and it turns out you are wrong, you're banned from Math.
Solving challenging problems can earn you "Unbanned from Math" cards, but they must be incredibly challenging.
So... Einstein would have been banned from theoretical physics using your rules. His original theory of Special Relativity was wrong in some cases, so we got "general" relativity as a correction... With your rules we would have banned him.
I wouldn't be too quick to "ban" anybody, unless they *should* have known better or they obviously violated the rules of math with their work and tried to hide it. You punish willful deception (those who are lying and know it), but mistakes and oversights are part of the human experience and why we have peer reviews. If you get found to have made mistakes or overlooked something, your reputation will suffer but you should be allowed to correct and proceed.
Except the name-callers have journalist friends and a big following, and may influence your revenue, by giving you a label no advertizer is willing to be seen near.
So, are you suggesting that it's OK to sacrifice your morals and beliefs because it's going to cost you money? I hope not.
Life isn't fair and you cannot control what others choose to do. I recommend not worrying about things you cannot control or avoid. All you can do is live with it. I'm not saying it is fair, I'm saying that you will be better off ignoring stuff you cannot control. Be true to your convictions, don't worry about stuff that is beyond your control, just let the chips fall where they may.
Too bad you sometimes can't even refuse to play the game.
Take Ninja, a Twitch gaming streamer. Popular, absolutely apolitical, flawless reputation. Recently, he was approached by some female streamers, who have strongly political streams, "bold statements" like painting breasts blue on live stream etc. They requested making joint streams with him. He politely refused.
Currently, Anita Sarkeesian calls him 'mysogynitst'.
But that's not HIS problem is it? If they want to call him names, they are the AssHats...
The point here is you CAN walk away.... In this case by just ignoring the unhappy name callers... It may not seem fair but it's out of your control so don't worry about it, do the right things and be happy with it. In most cases, the truth eventually rises to the surface, but if it never does, live with the clear conscience that comes from doing what you know is right.
Definitely wrong. Kernel devs I know pretty much all say that the only time Linus gets shouty is after he's warned people several times in private, and people _still_ push it into the public arena.
Still, he clearly engaged in personal attacks, in public and I presume in private. It's his right to just say "no!" and make it stick, no need to get angry and ventilate all that on his underlings, regardless of how insistent they are. There is a way to be both firm and respectful and if you do this right, leaders can get their way w/o being seen as asshats by the majority of folks. You simply don't resort to personal attacks, regardless of it being public or private or how upset you find yourself. At the very least, be willing to admit when you treat folks wrong.
My issue with Linus in the past is not really that he went too far from time to time, but that he didn't choose to admit to it, seemed to relish doing it. Nobody is perfect, but if you are justifying your clearly asshat actions and not apologizing for them, I'm not likely to hold you in high personal regard.
Perhaps he's come to the point where he's wiling to admit some of his past misbehavior.. I hope so. He's a bright guy and he (and Linux) could benefit greatly from a bit of polish on his people skills.
Unfortunately, some people you don't please some of the time will step forward and demand your dismissal due to your "toxic attitude".
Some people demand to be pleased all the time.
LOL.. Yes, the real asshats do make such demands. I was raised by a stepfather who was EXACTLY like this, narcissist all the way, so I know how to deal with such folks. I don't let them bother me or if I cannot do that, I just walk away and let them bury themselves and/or work around them as best I can. If management sees my "live and let live" credo as a "toxic attitude" then I really don't want to be working for said company so I'll just get another job.
However, I've only had one instance where I've had to quit a job for this kind of thing. Working for a company, I got shuffled around as the available work changed. I ended up working with a real idiot with an attitude bigger than his hat size. All hat and no cattle as the saying goes. As asshat WAS my manger, I didn't get accused of having a toxic attitude, only of being incompetent and stupid for not reading his mind correctly. I arranged to leave his employ at my next opportunity, left him to deal with the mess he was creating.
So, if you run into such people, the best revenge is to let them do the work, their way, just arrange to not get blamed when they fail...
With something as important as the kernel, only the best effort can be accepted. His passion is fine. No one has a right to not be offended.
But Linus has engaged in personal attacks, which are NEVER necessary and always counterproductive. It's bad enough when folks take a critique of their work product personally, but you are just adding unnecessary insults when you call folks stupid, clueless, ignorant wastes of space (or some such).
I'm all about being truthful, but I'm also about being kind and respectful in the process. Linus has historically not been too concerned about respect or kindness when he's dishing out his opinions. He's just been able to get away with it due to his technical abilities and position. Where I don't want him to back off with his genius, I do think he'd be well served by a change in attitude over those who do volunteer work for him and taking a bit less confrontational approach and being more respectful of others.
It's a fine thing to build huge and beautiful sand castles but it's quite another to start throwing sand at those who are trying to help you because you don't like their work.
Plenty of people out there see any sort of strong self-confidence as "jerk behavior." In fact the more insecure the individual, the more hopelessly assholeish your confidence will appear to them.
You can please some of the people, all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you simply cannot please all the people all the time. Wise people don't waste effort trying.
I understand folks may not like me, but I don't make a point to cultivate dislike, neither do I actively avoid offending others at the expense of the my morals, ethics. I'm more concerned about other's best interests than having them like what I do or say. So if they don't like me, that's their issue, not mine. Some consider me an AssHat, many don't. It's up to them, it matters not to me.
I prefer a nation of laws over your "get with the times".
I think we should still beat women, keep black people as slaves and chop off the hands of bread thieves. So I fully agree, laws should never change.
I never said ignore the law. Change the damn law.
p.s. You're an idiot.
Well, then go try to change the constitution and call me if you manage to get universal single payer health care shoehorned into it someplace. Until then, don't be blathering on about how I should "get with the times" when I bring up how the Constitution precludes what you want to do. There IS a prescribed method to amend the US Constitution, I suggest you avail yourself of the proper means and stop this wholesale ignoring of the basic laws of this land just because you think you have a cause.
By the way.. Beating women was never legal in this country, nor was chopping off hands the prescribed punishment for stealing. Further, it was BECAUSE of the founding principles of this country that slavery was eventually recognized as illegal and done away with here and afar in other countries where our success at abolishing the institution became known.
Also, I've not advocated for laws that cannot be changed, far from it. I'm simply advocating that we should enforce them as written and only change the laws though the prescribed legal method. This is how laws are supposed to work, and anything short of following the laws and their original intent is tantamount to being lawless. Being lawless is a dangerous place for all involved.
Oh yeah, that's just what I want, Google having yet more access to me, with no way to block or remove it. Looks like vehicles from the "Renault-Nissan-Mitsubish Alliance" are now on the list of vehicles I will NEVER buy.
Well, my Nissan quest wasn't a bad Mini-van considering... But I'm with you, I don't want Google as my Co-Pilot, unless I can turn them off and the "do not track" setting is actually honored. With Google, heck, with Apple too, you cannot ever be sure the security settings are being honored, but you can at least turn a phone off or place it in a faraday cage if you don't want it phoning home with personal data.
The entire concept came out of the Heritage Foundation think tank -- so the ACA is hardly a liberal concept. It's an insurance policy to insure insurance companies so that they might insure the people they can't make a profit on.
>The problem is the federal government is NOT the proper place for such social experiments.
Yeah, because they do this for 1/2 to 1/4th the price we do and take care of everyone in most every civilized country on the planet.
"Experimental phase" for the free market, rape and pillage the sick system we have is over and it's a failed product.
Oh heck no.. I've worked for the government so I know.. It's NOT an efficient way to do ANYTHING where you need to limit costs and for health care, cost is HUGE.
Have you ever heard about the amount of fraud in just one program: Medicare? What about the level of service at the VA? I'm pretty sure we cannot afford single payer, it will be hugely more expensive than what we have now and like the VA and the DMV we will get crap for service, with folks dying of survivable illness because the resources won't be there.
So what we actually need is LESS government involvement not more. We need to get back to situations where individuals are paying their own medical bills directly, because THEN we'd restore market forces to medical costs and that would drive efficiency as well as quality of care.
Is not a good excuse for not treating Americans equally, especially given the time it was written where each state may as well have been its own country and the thought of living in one state while working in other or traveling through multiple states in an hour was a fantasy. As was keeping up with realtime information of what was happening in other states.
Time to get with the times.
I prefer a nation of laws over your "get with the times". One cannot just choose to ignore the law because it seems like the thing to do. The constitution is the founding document of our government and explains what it can and cannot do, in short it is the legal basis for the government's actions. We MUST interpret it as written, just like all our other laws or we have no laws because they are open to being changed by "getting with the times". If this original meaning is not the fundamental legal principle, we have no laws, why pretend then that we do?
Reprocessing is where this will eventually go. It simply has to. Dumping "waste" that is 80-90% usable fuel is about as stupid as it gets.
As stupid as it gets is actually producing waste that you don't have a viable management scheme for. And we don't, because not only is nuclear not cost effective, but reprocessing fuel is even less cost effective. It's dangerous and expensive and requires military oversight because of the potential for misuse of the materials. It's just idiotic all over when it's cheaper to get the same kind of capacity out of battery+solar/wind, which it is.
Photovoltaic solar is absolutely the worst priced solution for electrical power generation. It's well above all other commercial methods in costs and is likely to remain so. Wind is marginally priced, but still above nuclear in costs. The absolute cheapest is Natural Gas.
The Chernobyl exclusion zone will not remain dangerous for 10 thousand years, only a few hundred.
It's expected to remain unlivable for longer than the USA has been in existence. When we are talking about time scales longer than anyone reading this will be alive it's a distinction without much of a difference.
But do get my point about that accident. It was the WORST conceivable scenario.
No it was not the worst conceivable scenario. Very bad yes but it's trivial to conceive of a worse one. Imagine an accident similar to Chernobyl had happened at Indian Point just 25 miles from New York City. If the wind happened to be blowing the right way it could render the city uninhabitable under the right conditions. Unlikely I'll grant but the probability is not zero.
For Pete's sake... Chernobyl's core was built from flammable graphite which CAUGHT FIRE during the accident. Also, the core literally exploded with the criticality excursion and spread the burning parts of the core over a wide area because the thin, fragile containment structure had been totally destroyed and as the core melted it released huge amounts of dangerous stuff. NONE of these elements (flammable materials in the core or fragile containment structures) are being used in the west. We don't use this design or any aspects of it BECAUSE of the inherent dangers it poses. We use water and other nonflammable moderators in commercial plants for a reason. It's MUCH safer with much lower risks. Using Chernobyl as an example of how bad it could be in the USA is overstating the risks, by a LONG shot.
So, NO reactor in the USA is going to first explode, then catch fire and release such huge amounts of garbage. As close as we've come is Japan, where the issue isn't that bad for the long term. TWO reactors blew up there, and yes it's a mess, but if you consider that this accident was caused by a preceding natural disaster that was many orders of magnitude more damaging than the reactor accidents, it puts it into perspective. The tsunami was a bigger mess, destroyed more homes and even killed folks, where the reactor accidents didn't kill anybody. In the grand scheme of things, the reactor accidents where/are bad, but the damage done by them pales in comparison to the earthquake and tsunami.
Then when you consider that the plants in Japan where 30+ year old designs, that the current crop of nuclear power plants are MUCH safer than what we have in service now, I really think you are overstating the risks by a mile. We have very strict regulations and competent folks overseeing the industry. The risks of *serious* problems is very low as evidenced by the safe operation of 30 year old equipment for decades. I think we could make it even safer if we allow the building of new plants, using new designs using safer principles and practices that we've learned in the past 50 years.
Well, they where forced to, by Obamacare's rules... Oh, not explicitly, but implicitly. Obamacare says you couldn't sign up any new members to a non-compliant healthcare plan (because that's the rule), the writing was on the wall for my plan, put there by Obamacare. So, they could have kept the plan, but the declining enrolment in the plan and the fact that they couldn't enroll new members made it inevitable the plan would be cancelled.
Nice try..
The net effect was that I lost my plan and Obamcare was responsible for that.
The problem is the federal government is NOT the proper place for such social experiments.
Yeah because screw treating Americans equally.
No.. Because the US Constitution CLEARLY states that the principle that the Federal government is a limited one, leaving the majority of power to the people and to the States. So the States can do a LOT more than the federal government can.... At least in principle.
Not that we are apparently all that concerned about our founding principles.... How Obamacare ever was considered an acceptable idea by our founding principles is beyond me. But we do have folks uttering the "Healthcare is a right" nonsense too, as if that right was enumerated in the constitution as the 11th amendment in the Bill of Rights.
The Chernobyl exclusion zone will not remain dangerous for 10 thousand years, only a few hundred. In fact, it's quite habitable now if you are older and avoid specific hot spots where radiation doses might get too high. They used the second reactor on site for decades more after the accident, meaning human occupation is perfectly acceptable. The issue around Chernobyl is that the hot spots are hard to know and avoid, so it's easier and cheaper just to keep people out for now. Eventually, it will make economic sense to finish the clean up and when it does, they will.
But do get my point about that accident. It was the WORST conceivable scenario. Such accidents where never possible outside of the Russian sphere of influence as such dangerous designs would NEVER be put into industrial operation. Even so, the accident wasn't responsible for laying waste to the land for even a thousand years. In fact, BOTH cities where atomic bombs where used are inhabited and it's been less than 100 years since the end of WW2. Plus the WORST accident in the western world was in Japan where multiple containment structures where destroyed. The exclusion zone from that will be cleaned up before I die and is currently more about an abundance of caution and avoidance of liability than anything else. It's just cheaper to toss everybody out and raze the whole thing than play the creeping liability and punitive damages game in the courts. They will clean up that land, but it's going to take a bit of time to get around to it as they are concentrating on decommissioning the damaged plants first.
In the USA, the *worst* accident we have was TMI, which was a nothing burger for the general public, though it caused financial issues for the operator. We literally had a partial meltdown in the middle of a highly populated area, but even after decades of looking we cannot find where anybody was harmed, had a latent cancer or any other kind of issue caused by the accident. We had like two onsite excessive radiation exposures for plant workers during the clean up, but zero evidence of anything for the general public.
So, you are scare mongering with the "Laying waste to a state for 10,000 years" thing. Yes there are risks, but nothing as dire as you claim.
Personally, I'm for reprocessing spent fuel to generate new fuel sources and concentrating the high level nuclear waste into smaller components. The truly useless and dangerous stuff is a tiny fraction of the total volume. I'm pretty sure we could invent some ceramic/glass encasement which was water tight and would remain so for the time required. Further, I'm confident that we could dump this stuff in places where the natural tectonic plate movement would assure its natural tendency would be to bury it deeper and give us a couple of million of years before it would resurface and cause problems with groundwater.
The only real requirement here is that the storage of the material be inert and stable for a few million years. I don't think the Swiss are thinking this fully through....
Dumping "waste" that is 80-90% usable fuel is about as stupid as it gets.
Depending on reactor technology (and that focuses on the reactors currently used in the US), waste has less than 1% useable fuel. That is actually why it is called "waste".
Sure, you could get the uranium out of it and "burn" it in a CANDU reactor, but such the US don't have. So: it is waste...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spent_nuclear_fuel
You are being misleading. Of the original U238 which constituted a small fraction of the total unspent fuel, over half still exists when the fuel is no longer usable. Also, additional fuel was created in the form of Pu 239 and Pu 240 which is not useable in Uranium reactors, but can be used in reactors designed to use it. So the U238 part of the fuel is about 1%, but it was only about 5% to start with and other parts of the spent fuel make up a considerable resource of nuclear fuel which can be reprocessed, reused and recycled many times to produce usable energy.
Reprocessing is the only solution that really makes sense. It allows the separation of the really nasty and long term radio active stuff from the majority of the mass, so we have less volume of stuff to get rid of making it easier to isolate and contain long term, produces useable fuel for more energy production and reduces the danger of having spent fuel distributed all over the country in long term storage pools.
I would tell you that your two best arguments here are about two things. 1. The risks of transportation of spent fuel to the reprocessing site and 2. The non-proliferation concerns of nuclear material from the Pu produced from reprocessing, as Pu is the bomb making material of choice. I would argue that the transportation risks are "one time" while the long term storage risks are on going for the first part. Second, I would argue that the Pu produced from power reactors is poor bomb making material, being the wrong mix of Pu isotopes, but it's great fuel for power production.
So please be reasonable and not misleading with your information if you wish for me to take you seriously.
Yucca mountain, a facility totally inappropriate to contain nuclear waste because it is pumice.
What's wrong with pumice?
It's porous and it might, just might, rain to much in Utah to contain the nuclear waste for long enough... Or so the stupid argument goes. IF it rains enough in Utah for this to be a problem... What kind of climate change has happened then? I think the least of our worries will by one radioactive mountain.
And Obamacare was the rightwing ideal, it started off the same as Romneycare, and STILL the republicans demanded more pro-corp BS.
And STILL we get to hear this lie repeated. This was NOT a rightwing idea. As Romney plainly said, multiple times during his failed presidential campaign, if a STATE wants universal healthcare, they are free to try it. The problem is the federal government is NOT the proper place for such social experiments. But your side passed it anyway.
Democrats simply want to share the blame for this disaster of a law. Well, it was good enough for your side to pass it over the objections of the Republicans, it's your law to defend and your mess to own, not ours. It's not our fault that you guys passed the lemon of a law, that you didn't even read it or accept ANY input from the other side of the isle.
I know who lied about this, it wasn't the Republicans. Remember "If you like your plan, you can keep your plan!" and "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor!" and my personal favorite "It will save a family of 4 $2,500!" Well, My plan changed, my doctor changed and my costs went UP.
How much are you being paid by the nuclear energy industry? Neither solar nor wind power can render an entire state too dangerous to live for the next 10 thousand years.
What are you talking about? The absolute worst accident we've had, where a stupidly designed reactor was literally blown apart and burned for days didn't produce such a unlivable place for 10 thousand years, and certainly not a state sized portion of real estate. Even in Japan, where we blew apart multiple reactors, the situation isn't going to leave the ground uninhabitable that long nor is it the size you want to think.
I'm not going to tell you there are not risks, but I am going to insist on being reasonable about assessing those risks.
There are new reactor designs which are NOT going to catch fire and burn, won't suffer meltdowns and containment breaches even in the worst case dooms day scenarios you can imagine. But because you want to believe the fiction "China Syndrome" Hollywood depictions of what happened at TMI, we are stuck running rickety old 50 year old facilities (Even then with a safety record that is pretty darned good, with only ONE serious accident in the USA's commercial operating history, and that one being of nearly zero effect on the public, with the only negative effect being the hysteria.)
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No matter what you say or do, someone will find it offensive.
Which is why you "live and let live" regardless of what others say or do. I'm not responsible for your behavior, only mine and it's my responsibility to do the right thing, regardless of what you or society in general thinks. I can only change my little corner of the world, I can only really control my behavior and it's folly to worry about changing things beyond my control.
So if they don't like me, that's their issue, not mine. Some consider me an AssHat, many don't. It's up to them, it matters not to me.
It's a fine line. There is no issue in calling someone out on their bullshit, whether it's a bad work product or a bad attitude. It should be done, else the bad product and attitude will most certainly continue. It's just best done tactfully, which is the area where Linus was lacking.
I have no issues calling bad work bad or bad attitudes being unhelpful, but I do tread lightly in such conversations, especially when I'm dealing with peers. Having such conversations are a bit easier with subordinates, but even then, it pays to be very careful. But this kind of thing is about helping the person who is producing the bad work or having the bad attitude and not about just confronting to get my frustrations out.
Linus' issue was he was venting at the expense of his subordinates. He let his anger drive him, so instead of being tactful and effective, he drove folks off. I know I decided to not ever consider working on the Kernel project because of his antics. I'm not claiming they lost anything by not having my help, but I'm sure I am not alone and chances are somebody out there who would have been an asset, never considered it for the same reason.
Let's start defining some stakes.
If you come up with a proof and it's wrong, you're banned from Math.
If you say a proof is wrong and it turns out you are wrong, you're banned from Math.
Solving challenging problems can earn you "Unbanned from Math" cards, but they must be incredibly challenging.
So... Einstein would have been banned from theoretical physics using your rules. His original theory of Special Relativity was wrong in some cases, so we got "general" relativity as a correction... With your rules we would have banned him.
I wouldn't be too quick to "ban" anybody, unless they *should* have known better or they obviously violated the rules of math with their work and tried to hide it. You punish willful deception (those who are lying and know it), but mistakes and oversights are part of the human experience and why we have peer reviews. If you get found to have made mistakes or overlooked something, your reputation will suffer but you should be allowed to correct and proceed.
Except the name-callers have journalist friends and a big following, and may influence your revenue, by giving you a label no advertizer is willing to be seen near.
So, are you suggesting that it's OK to sacrifice your morals and beliefs because it's going to cost you money? I hope not.
Life isn't fair and you cannot control what others choose to do. I recommend not worrying about things you cannot control or avoid. All you can do is live with it. I'm not saying it is fair, I'm saying that you will be better off ignoring stuff you cannot control. Be true to your convictions, don't worry about stuff that is beyond your control, just let the chips fall where they may.
Too bad you sometimes can't even refuse to play the game.
Take Ninja, a Twitch gaming streamer. Popular, absolutely apolitical, flawless reputation. Recently, he was approached by some female streamers, who have strongly political streams, "bold statements" like painting breasts blue on live stream etc. They requested making joint streams with him. He politely refused.
Currently, Anita Sarkeesian calls him 'mysogynitst'.
But that's not HIS problem is it? If they want to call him names, they are the AssHats...
The point here is you CAN walk away.... In this case by just ignoring the unhappy name callers... It may not seem fair but it's out of your control so don't worry about it, do the right things and be happy with it. In most cases, the truth eventually rises to the surface, but if it never does, live with the clear conscience that comes from doing what you know is right.
Definitely wrong. Kernel devs I know pretty much all say that the only time Linus gets shouty is after he's warned people several times in private, and people _still_ push it into the public arena.
Still, he clearly engaged in personal attacks, in public and I presume in private. It's his right to just say "no!" and make it stick, no need to get angry and ventilate all that on his underlings, regardless of how insistent they are. There is a way to be both firm and respectful and if you do this right, leaders can get their way w/o being seen as asshats by the majority of folks. You simply don't resort to personal attacks, regardless of it being public or private or how upset you find yourself. At the very least, be willing to admit when you treat folks wrong.
My issue with Linus in the past is not really that he went too far from time to time, but that he didn't choose to admit to it, seemed to relish doing it. Nobody is perfect, but if you are justifying your clearly asshat actions and not apologizing for them, I'm not likely to hold you in high personal regard.
Perhaps he's come to the point where he's wiling to admit some of his past misbehavior.. I hope so. He's a bright guy and he (and Linux) could benefit greatly from a bit of polish on his people skills.
Unfortunately, some people you don't please some of the time will step forward and demand your dismissal due to your "toxic attitude".
Some people demand to be pleased all the time.
LOL.. Yes, the real asshats do make such demands. I was raised by a stepfather who was EXACTLY like this, narcissist all the way, so I know how to deal with such folks. I don't let them bother me or if I cannot do that, I just walk away and let them bury themselves and/or work around them as best I can. If management sees my "live and let live" credo as a "toxic attitude" then I really don't want to be working for said company so I'll just get another job.
However, I've only had one instance where I've had to quit a job for this kind of thing. Working for a company, I got shuffled around as the available work changed. I ended up working with a real idiot with an attitude bigger than his hat size. All hat and no cattle as the saying goes. As asshat WAS my manger, I didn't get accused of having a toxic attitude, only of being incompetent and stupid for not reading his mind correctly. I arranged to leave his employ at my next opportunity, left him to deal with the mess he was creating.
So, if you run into such people, the best revenge is to let them do the work, their way, just arrange to not get blamed when they fail...
With something as important as the kernel, only the best effort can be accepted. His passion is fine. No one has a right to not be offended.
But Linus has engaged in personal attacks, which are NEVER necessary and always counterproductive. It's bad enough when folks take a critique of their work product personally, but you are just adding unnecessary insults when you call folks stupid, clueless, ignorant wastes of space (or some such).
I'm all about being truthful, but I'm also about being kind and respectful in the process. Linus has historically not been too concerned about respect or kindness when he's dishing out his opinions. He's just been able to get away with it due to his technical abilities and position. Where I don't want him to back off with his genius, I do think he'd be well served by a change in attitude over those who do volunteer work for him and taking a bit less confrontational approach and being more respectful of others.
It's a fine thing to build huge and beautiful sand castles but it's quite another to start throwing sand at those who are trying to help you because you don't like their work.
Plenty of people out there see any sort of strong self-confidence as "jerk behavior." In fact the more insecure the individual, the more hopelessly assholeish your confidence will appear to them.
You can please some of the people, all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you simply cannot please all the people all the time. Wise people don't waste effort trying.
I understand folks may not like me, but I don't make a point to cultivate dislike, neither do I actively avoid offending others at the expense of the my morals, ethics. I'm more concerned about other's best interests than having them like what I do or say. So if they don't like me, that's their issue, not mine. Some consider me an AssHat, many don't. It's up to them, it matters not to me.
I prefer a nation of laws over your "get with the times".
I think we should still beat women, keep black people as slaves and chop off the hands of bread thieves. So I fully agree, laws should never change.
I never said ignore the law. Change the damn law.
p.s. You're an idiot.
Well, then go try to change the constitution and call me if you manage to get universal single payer health care shoehorned into it someplace. Until then, don't be blathering on about how I should "get with the times" when I bring up how the Constitution precludes what you want to do. There IS a prescribed method to amend the US Constitution, I suggest you avail yourself of the proper means and stop this wholesale ignoring of the basic laws of this land just because you think you have a cause.
By the way.. Beating women was never legal in this country, nor was chopping off hands the prescribed punishment for stealing. Further, it was BECAUSE of the founding principles of this country that slavery was eventually recognized as illegal and done away with here and afar in other countries where our success at abolishing the institution became known.
Also, I've not advocated for laws that cannot be changed, far from it. I'm simply advocating that we should enforce them as written and only change the laws though the prescribed legal method. This is how laws are supposed to work, and anything short of following the laws and their original intent is tantamount to being lawless. Being lawless is a dangerous place for all involved.
Sorry, you lost me at "Mini-van".
Ah, haven't had multiple kids yet. Well, stop at two or the Mini-Van is going to be something you need....
Oh yeah, that's just what I want, Google having yet more access to me, with no way to block or remove it. Looks like vehicles from the "Renault-Nissan-Mitsubish Alliance" are now on the list of vehicles I will NEVER buy.
Well, my Nissan quest wasn't a bad Mini-van considering... But I'm with you, I don't want Google as my Co-Pilot, unless I can turn them off and the "do not track" setting is actually honored. With Google, heck, with Apple too, you cannot ever be sure the security settings are being honored, but you can at least turn a phone off or place it in a faraday cage if you don't want it phoning home with personal data.
The entire concept came out of the Heritage Foundation think tank -- so the ACA is hardly a liberal concept. It's an insurance policy to insure insurance companies so that they might insure the people they can't make a profit on.
>The problem is the federal government is NOT the proper place for such social experiments.
Yeah, because they do this for 1/2 to 1/4th the price we do and take care of everyone in most every civilized country on the planet.
"Experimental phase" for the free market, rape and pillage the sick system we have is over and it's a failed product.
Oh heck no.. I've worked for the government so I know.. It's NOT an efficient way to do ANYTHING where you need to limit costs and for health care, cost is HUGE.
Have you ever heard about the amount of fraud in just one program: Medicare? What about the level of service at the VA? I'm pretty sure we cannot afford single payer, it will be hugely more expensive than what we have now and like the VA and the DMV we will get crap for service, with folks dying of survivable illness because the resources won't be there.
So what we actually need is LESS government involvement not more. We need to get back to situations where individuals are paying their own medical bills directly, because THEN we'd restore market forces to medical costs and that would drive efficiency as well as quality of care.
No.. Because the US Constitution CLEARLY states
Is not a good excuse for not treating Americans equally, especially given the time it was written where each state may as well have been its own country and the thought of living in one state while working in other or traveling through multiple states in an hour was a fantasy. As was keeping up with realtime information of what was happening in other states.
Time to get with the times.
I prefer a nation of laws over your "get with the times". One cannot just choose to ignore the law because it seems like the thing to do. The constitution is the founding document of our government and explains what it can and cannot do, in short it is the legal basis for the government's actions. We MUST interpret it as written, just like all our other laws or we have no laws because they are open to being changed by "getting with the times". If this original meaning is not the fundamental legal principle, we have no laws, why pretend then that we do?
Fair enough... Still.. My point is the same.... It doesn't rain much in Utah..... At least for now.
Reprocessing is where this will eventually go. It simply has to. Dumping "waste" that is 80-90% usable fuel is about as stupid as it gets.
As stupid as it gets is actually producing waste that you don't have a viable management scheme for. And we don't, because not only is nuclear not cost effective, but reprocessing fuel is even less cost effective. It's dangerous and expensive and requires military oversight because of the potential for misuse of the materials. It's just idiotic all over when it's cheaper to get the same kind of capacity out of battery+solar/wind, which it is.
Photovoltaic solar is absolutely the worst priced solution for electrical power generation. It's well above all other commercial methods in costs and is likely to remain so. Wind is marginally priced, but still above nuclear in costs. The absolute cheapest is Natural Gas.
So Nuclear is cheaper than both solar (by a mile) and wind by a fraction. https://www.google.com/imgres?...
The Chernobyl exclusion zone will not remain dangerous for 10 thousand years, only a few hundred.
It's expected to remain unlivable for longer than the USA has been in existence. When we are talking about time scales longer than anyone reading this will be alive it's a distinction without much of a difference.
But do get my point about that accident. It was the WORST conceivable scenario.
No it was not the worst conceivable scenario. Very bad yes but it's trivial to conceive of a worse one. Imagine an accident similar to Chernobyl had happened at Indian Point just 25 miles from New York City. If the wind happened to be blowing the right way it could render the city uninhabitable under the right conditions. Unlikely I'll grant but the probability is not zero.
For Pete's sake... Chernobyl's core was built from flammable graphite which CAUGHT FIRE during the accident. Also, the core literally exploded with the criticality excursion and spread the burning parts of the core over a wide area because the thin, fragile containment structure had been totally destroyed and as the core melted it released huge amounts of dangerous stuff. NONE of these elements (flammable materials in the core or fragile containment structures) are being used in the west. We don't use this design or any aspects of it BECAUSE of the inherent dangers it poses. We use water and other nonflammable moderators in commercial plants for a reason. It's MUCH safer with much lower risks. Using Chernobyl as an example of how bad it could be in the USA is overstating the risks, by a LONG shot.
So, NO reactor in the USA is going to first explode, then catch fire and release such huge amounts of garbage. As close as we've come is Japan, where the issue isn't that bad for the long term. TWO reactors blew up there, and yes it's a mess, but if you consider that this accident was caused by a preceding natural disaster that was many orders of magnitude more damaging than the reactor accidents, it puts it into perspective. The tsunami was a bigger mess, destroyed more homes and even killed folks, where the reactor accidents didn't kill anybody. In the grand scheme of things, the reactor accidents where/are bad, but the damage done by them pales in comparison to the earthquake and tsunami.
Then when you consider that the plants in Japan where 30+ year old designs, that the current crop of nuclear power plants are MUCH safer than what we have in service now, I really think you are overstating the risks by a mile. We have very strict regulations and competent folks overseeing the industry. The risks of *serious* problems is very low as evidenced by the safe operation of 30 year old equipment for decades. I think we could make it even safer if we allow the building of new plants, using new designs using safer principles and practices that we've learned in the past 50 years.
New Nukes, now!
LOL... Why did they do that?
Well, they where forced to, by Obamacare's rules... Oh, not explicitly, but implicitly. Obamacare says you couldn't sign up any new members to a non-compliant healthcare plan (because that's the rule), the writing was on the wall for my plan, put there by Obamacare. So, they could have kept the plan, but the declining enrolment in the plan and the fact that they couldn't enroll new members made it inevitable the plan would be cancelled.
Nice try..
The net effect was that I lost my plan and Obamcare was responsible for that.
The problem is the federal government is NOT the proper place for such social experiments.
Yeah because screw treating Americans equally.
No.. Because the US Constitution CLEARLY states that the principle that the Federal government is a limited one, leaving the majority of power to the people and to the States. So the States can do a LOT more than the federal government can.... At least in principle.
Not that we are apparently all that concerned about our founding principles.... How Obamacare ever was considered an acceptable idea by our founding principles is beyond me. But we do have folks uttering the "Healthcare is a right" nonsense too, as if that right was enumerated in the constitution as the 11th amendment in the Bill of Rights.
The Chernobyl exclusion zone will not remain dangerous for 10 thousand years, only a few hundred. In fact, it's quite habitable now if you are older and avoid specific hot spots where radiation doses might get too high. They used the second reactor on site for decades more after the accident, meaning human occupation is perfectly acceptable. The issue around Chernobyl is that the hot spots are hard to know and avoid, so it's easier and cheaper just to keep people out for now. Eventually, it will make economic sense to finish the clean up and when it does, they will.
But do get my point about that accident. It was the WORST conceivable scenario. Such accidents where never possible outside of the Russian sphere of influence as such dangerous designs would NEVER be put into industrial operation. Even so, the accident wasn't responsible for laying waste to the land for even a thousand years. In fact, BOTH cities where atomic bombs where used are inhabited and it's been less than 100 years since the end of WW2. Plus the WORST accident in the western world was in Japan where multiple containment structures where destroyed. The exclusion zone from that will be cleaned up before I die and is currently more about an abundance of caution and avoidance of liability than anything else. It's just cheaper to toss everybody out and raze the whole thing than play the creeping liability and punitive damages game in the courts. They will clean up that land, but it's going to take a bit of time to get around to it as they are concentrating on decommissioning the damaged plants first.
In the USA, the *worst* accident we have was TMI, which was a nothing burger for the general public, though it caused financial issues for the operator. We literally had a partial meltdown in the middle of a highly populated area, but even after decades of looking we cannot find where anybody was harmed, had a latent cancer or any other kind of issue caused by the accident. We had like two onsite excessive radiation exposures for plant workers during the clean up, but zero evidence of anything for the general public.
So, you are scare mongering with the "Laying waste to a state for 10,000 years" thing. Yes there are risks, but nothing as dire as you claim.
I wasn't arguing pro or con for Yucca Mountain.
Personally, I'm for reprocessing spent fuel to generate new fuel sources and concentrating the high level nuclear waste into smaller components. The truly useless and dangerous stuff is a tiny fraction of the total volume. I'm pretty sure we could invent some ceramic/glass encasement which was water tight and would remain so for the time required. Further, I'm confident that we could dump this stuff in places where the natural tectonic plate movement would assure its natural tendency would be to bury it deeper and give us a couple of million of years before it would resurface and cause problems with groundwater.
The only real requirement here is that the storage of the material be inert and stable for a few million years. I don't think the Swiss are thinking this fully through....
Dumping "waste" that is 80-90% usable fuel is about as stupid as it gets. Depending on reactor technology (and that focuses on the reactors currently used in the US), waste has less than 1% useable fuel. That is actually why it is called "waste".
Sure, you could get the uranium out of it and "burn" it in a CANDU reactor, but such the US don't have. So: it is waste ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spent_nuclear_fuel
You are being misleading. Of the original U238 which constituted a small fraction of the total unspent fuel, over half still exists when the fuel is no longer usable. Also, additional fuel was created in the form of Pu 239 and Pu 240 which is not useable in Uranium reactors, but can be used in reactors designed to use it. So the U238 part of the fuel is about 1%, but it was only about 5% to start with and other parts of the spent fuel make up a considerable resource of nuclear fuel which can be reprocessed, reused and recycled many times to produce usable energy.
Reprocessing is the only solution that really makes sense. It allows the separation of the really nasty and long term radio active stuff from the majority of the mass, so we have less volume of stuff to get rid of making it easier to isolate and contain long term, produces useable fuel for more energy production and reduces the danger of having spent fuel distributed all over the country in long term storage pools.
I would tell you that your two best arguments here are about two things. 1. The risks of transportation of spent fuel to the reprocessing site and 2. The non-proliferation concerns of nuclear material from the Pu produced from reprocessing, as Pu is the bomb making material of choice. I would argue that the transportation risks are "one time" while the long term storage risks are on going for the first part. Second, I would argue that the Pu produced from power reactors is poor bomb making material, being the wrong mix of Pu isotopes, but it's great fuel for power production.
So please be reasonable and not misleading with your information if you wish for me to take you seriously.
Yucca mountain, a facility totally inappropriate to contain nuclear waste because it is pumice.
What's wrong with pumice?
It's porous and it might, just might, rain to much in Utah to contain the nuclear waste for long enough... Or so the stupid argument goes. IF it rains enough in Utah for this to be a problem... What kind of climate change has happened then? I think the least of our worries will by one radioactive mountain.
And Obamacare was the rightwing ideal, it started off the same as Romneycare, and STILL the republicans demanded more pro-corp BS.
And STILL we get to hear this lie repeated. This was NOT a rightwing idea. As Romney plainly said, multiple times during his failed presidential campaign, if a STATE wants universal healthcare, they are free to try it. The problem is the federal government is NOT the proper place for such social experiments. But your side passed it anyway.
Democrats simply want to share the blame for this disaster of a law. Well, it was good enough for your side to pass it over the objections of the Republicans, it's your law to defend and your mess to own, not ours. It's not our fault that you guys passed the lemon of a law, that you didn't even read it or accept ANY input from the other side of the isle.
I know who lied about this, it wasn't the Republicans. Remember "If you like your plan, you can keep your plan!" and "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor!" and my personal favorite "It will save a family of 4 $2,500!" Well, My plan changed, my doctor changed and my costs went UP.
How much are you being paid by the nuclear energy industry? Neither solar nor wind power can render an entire state too dangerous to live for the next 10 thousand years.
What are you talking about? The absolute worst accident we've had, where a stupidly designed reactor was literally blown apart and burned for days didn't produce such a unlivable place for 10 thousand years, and certainly not a state sized portion of real estate. Even in Japan, where we blew apart multiple reactors, the situation isn't going to leave the ground uninhabitable that long nor is it the size you want to think.
I'm not going to tell you there are not risks, but I am going to insist on being reasonable about assessing those risks.
There are new reactor designs which are NOT going to catch fire and burn, won't suffer meltdowns and containment breaches even in the worst case dooms day scenarios you can imagine. But because you want to believe the fiction "China Syndrome" Hollywood depictions of what happened at TMI, we are stuck running rickety old 50 year old facilities (Even then with a safety record that is pretty darned good, with only ONE serious accident in the USA's commercial operating history, and that one being of nearly zero effect on the public, with the only negative effect being the hysteria.)